In some circles, Josh Ostrovsky is a social media superstar. In others, he’s a shameless thief, building a humor-based brand out of jokes written by actually funny people. He’s been a thorn in the side of comedians for some time, but it was his signing with talent agency CAA last week that sparked off a wave of online fury.

Ostrovsky, often called the Fat Jew, is a full-fledged Instagram celebrity, with 5.7 million followers. (He also tweets to a smaller audience as @FatJew). His Instagram feed is filled with jokes and amusing pictures, each accompanied by a pithy caption. In interviews, he describes his role as seeking out funny, buzz-worthy internet content and broadcasting it to world under his marketable brand. Comics say he steals wholesale from other social media feeds and deliberately removes the original source to imply that he wrote the material himself.

Ostrovsky has an eclectic résumé, including plus-size modelling, producing a line of rosé wines, and DJing for Apple Music Beats 1. A former host on the E! network, he is to release a book this fall entitled Money, Pizza, Respect. He has produced branded content for Virgin Mobile, Burger King and Stella Artois, and, at times, had TV deals with both Comedy Central and Amazon. (In a Billboard interview last year, he compared his proposed Comedy Central pilot to FX’s avant-garde comedy Louie.)

The Financial Times reported in July that he pulls in $6,000 per sponsored message (though a $2,500 figure is cited more often). In March, Time Magazine named him one of the 30 most influential people on the internet, alongside Barack Obama, Narendra Modi, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

His apparent sins are not unique; joke-stealing and other forms of content co-opting are common on all social media platforms, and he’s often lumped in with fellow Instagram star Elliot Tebele, who posts viral content as @FuckJerry.

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Defenders argue that these feeds are merely aggregating content that has potential, scouring through the dregs of Reddit and Tumblr for gems that they can bring to a mass audience. When Ostrovsky has been called out in past for copying jokes, he has blamed his interns or insisted that internet memes are nearly impossible to trace to their original source.

Part of the problem stems from Ostrovsky’s medium of choice, Instagram, which doesn’t have an inbuilt way to share content from other feeds, like Twitter’s retweet option. (There are third-party apps that let users “regram” photos.) Instagram’s policy says that it cares deeply about intellectual property rights, but users say it can be difficult to get the site to delete stolen content, and it doesn’t do enough to police theft. (Twitter got attention last month for cracking down on stolen jokes on copyright grounds.)

In standup terminology, oft-repeated gags that can’t be sourced are known as “street jokes”, and in the days of vaudeville and Catskill comedy, most comedy routines were simply a mix of these old standards. The focus on original material in standup is generally traced to the 1950s and the likes of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, whose timely and political material sparked a standup revolution. Over time, the move to more confessional, personal jokes meant comics felt more ownership over their material, and stealing jokes became seen as a terrible taboo in comedy. Accusations of joke theft have plagued comedians like Robin Williams, Denis Leary, Carlos Mencia and even Keith Chegwin.

Ostrovsky himself has rejected the idea of doing live standup, sensibly pointing out that making money off of internet fame is much easier. As he told the Financial Times in July: “Not getting all high and mighty about it, but it’s more like performance art than comedy.”